There are reeds singing in his step, hollow and full of wind-song. He's louder than the fires crackling pale at her back and the smoke rising in towers of prayer towards the black thickness of space. When he comes she licks the air and it tastes like bitter, rotten wine on her corpse lips. She smiles, to hear the thrum of his steps and a deluge of flickering light pours out from her.

It pours from her eyes and her mouth, like sickness and plague. She's poisoned with god-light and she's dead from the brightness just as she always had been.

She wonders if he knows how sweet the dirt is, how it tastes like sugar when the swamp water soaks it and makes brackish water and drowning mud. Each of her eyes holds a promise of it, of death, of darkness and she's eager to close the distance between them. She leans into the space not like a wood-land creature but the space itself, reaching out endlessly in a refusal to be tamed. There's stardust in her teeth and wormholes in the hollow creases framing her rib-cage where the fire is afraid to glow.

He is a forest and wine. She is everything in the places where the forest is full of rot, bones and moss. And the forest always dies, even when it's reborn it dies and dies and dies again. She wonders when he will die.

“Oh." It's not a question but a sigh of light in the way the moon sighs through the dark clouds that try to devour all the stone-light of it. She blinks and the fires look bright because she lets them. “Is this a mortal world?” Stardust makes the words coarse, like dust and smoke and soot, when she raises her eyes to the tines of his antlers reaching from his crown like bones reaching out from a spine.

Eshek knows it's not a mortal world anymore. Not now, not ever again. How could it be?

She wonders if he looks at all her light and realizes that the course of this place has shifted and realigned like a fracture, jagged and sharp enough to puncture through skin. “I am here.” A pause, an aching throb of light that taste like life when she swallows it down, down, down like a stone of a planet. It sits heavy in her stomach and she feels bloated with it (bloated like a fat, dead sea-worm). “Because your world is broken.” Each words sits on her tongue like a gavel, a blade of judgment eager for the neck.

Eshek has come, as she always does, to save them all.

A hundred blurred light-years flicker in her gaze as she watches that swinging metal blade against his heart. She can feel the magic of it it, pulsing like a second heartbeat between his bones, begging to be tasted. Another part of her is disappointed that he has a blade at all, that he hasn't already torn the world asunder with his crown of bones.

“Mortal.” Light makes the word bitter in the darkness, and it doesn't sound like a repetition but a name. Eshek wants to rip her skin open and paint the word in whorls of light across his ribs, down his back, shape it to look like tears falling from his eyes like stars from the sky. She wants to anoint him in herself, until he rises dripping ichor and gold instead of blood. Would he shed his antlers then like a season?

Her body leans into the space between them. She misses when her body could split apart like jaws, when her ribs could hug like a snake. This body carries none of her old grotesqueness and her infinity moons that took the form of organs. All this body holds is holiness: religion, light and death. A hoof scrapes elegantly across the stone, it sounds like a blade drawn across old bone.

The lift of her head is almost defiant. When he touches her shoulder it seems almost if she might impale herself upon his tines. She thinks about it, about drowning him in the holiness of her. She's dead anyway, she's eternal.

In the end she only lowers her head when he lays his crown like a kiss below her eyes. She smiles and her teeth grind like a saw between her bloody lips. “If you have not taken it, ” The words blow like a breeze across his brow and she watches the air move beneath it like she's the east wind. Her teeth are still grinding together, bone on restless, dead bone. Eshek pauses, inhales and swallows soot and the sweet tang of ivy.

She inhales him.

“I will.” The east wind says. And then, she presses her cheek hard into his tine, hard enough to cut. Light drips down him like tears of the moon, like the sorrows of every burning sun in the infinite blackness of space. Lysander is more lovely with drops of her running down his crown of bones like snakes.

Her blood makes him look like a god dripping ambrosia.

Aether is spiraling in her like a tornado and it's gnawing at the shores of her flesh and the cracks in her bones. With each whip of spectral wind she's breaking down and molecules of her are floating around her stomach like drops of rain that have escaped the atmosphere.

There are stars gloaming in her chest, as if she has swallowed the goddess of this place. There is a sun flaring in her heart and the core of it is oddly frozen and hard as ice. On her skin there is the reflection of twilight, pastel colors that shift and look like paint dripped from a sharp handled brush. In her eyes there is the rising of every day that has ever been. Each blink of her eyes is both night, day, and all the things between the two.

She wants to tell him she's already devoured all the gods, that the light of her is already etching eulogies to them on the canvas of her bones. Instead she too licks the blood falling between them and it tastes just like her sweat tastes. It tastes like a universe-- salt, stone and stars.

“Were.” Each word is silver and metal sharp on her tongue. She bleeds with her words and her own light on her lips feels like a pyre on her cool skin. “There were other gods here.” When he withdraws his tines she wants to dash herself against him, as if she is the sea and a he rock that hasn't turned to sand. She wants to make sand out of him, sand that could be tossed into a wind so that it might tear flesh from bone.

Instead, she lets him pull away and she understands. She understands even as she wants to crack open and swallow him whole like a wave on a single oyster hiding a pearl.

Darkness falls when she blinks, lit only by the fires at her back and the small fireflies of blood dying between them. Each drop of her falls and together each forms a constellation on the dark stone at their feet. She looks at it and doesn't want his blade anymore.

“I am already hunting them.” Eshek opens her mouth and between her bone white teeth there is the night.

Hunger is swarming at her. A corpse made of insects instead of vegetation is blooming in her. Canopies of wings are spreading across her insides, thick enough to devour every inch of night that threatens to creep inside the holes of her. Roots of larva are digging in, spreading and spreading, and Eshek already knows what will blossom in the rich grave-dirt of her soul.

She wonders what she could grow form the wine and blood soaked soil of Lysander. What could a god grow in a heart heavy with blood instead of Ichor? Eshek looks at his tines like altars and adornments. She looks at him like hunger is swarming, and blooming, and rooting inside her like a forest.

The roll of his jaw beneath his skin looks like a prayer when he cannot meet the gaping holes of light the world around her calls eyes. Eshek feels flowers sprout in her forest. They are sharp and full of stars. She grins back at him and it's how a universe grins at the black trapped between its gravity.

There is a forest in her but she is not wolf in a wood. She the space in which a hundred forests live. And in those forests a million predators look at each other, licking at their teeth like worry is not blooming in their hearts.

Lysander turns away from the obscene constellations of blood shining between them. “Willing.”She laughs, and laughs, and laughs. The bonfires and the music all seem quiet (hushed like dead things) in the echo of her laughter. A meteor lives in the violent forest and roots of her amusement.

Some gods...

Some gods are not universes. This Eshek has always understood (even as she wished it wasn't true). Universes are always willing, but gods... gods are not.